Noel Recipes

Cake rolls, as the name implies, are cakes that are spread with jelly or buttercream and then rolled into logs. The French name is roulade. For this recipe, I decided to use matcha green tea because of its very delicate flavor. It also gives the cake (called génoise in French) a beautiful jade green color. I filled and covered the cake with vanilla butter-cream and kept the flavors appropriately Zen in their simplicity.

Matcha green tea is fairly expensive and has a very short shelf life, so once the box is unsealed, consume it fast. Enjoy it as is with hot water or flavor your favorite desserts with the green tea powder. I had a little less than one tablespoon left in the tin. I think I had made pretty good use of it with desserts such as Vietnamese agar agar desserts, tea lattés, crème brulées and ice cream.

Bûche de Noël is known by many names. Whether you call it a Yule Log, roulade or simply a roll cake, few desserts are as synonymous with Christmas. For this recipe, the roll cake I used is a simple, coconut-flavored génoise. It's basically a sponge cake. The filling is a mango and rum ganache and I made a chocolate rum butter-cream to cover the log.

When I was a kid in France, we used to buy a Yule Log every year. It may seem strange, but the flavor we would always get was mango. It's like a warm tropical breeze on a cold winter night. Though mango is clearly not a traditional holiday flavor, once you try this Bûche de Noël, you won't go back to vanilla and chocolate.